Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Bath (UK), SEPTEMBER 2009 - CSL has recently launched CSL Animation (http://www.Cartoonstock.com/animation), creating a new marketplace for freelance animators and a source for clients to license and download short humorous animations along with the copyright clearance to redistribute them.

CartoonStock.com, founded in 1998, has grown to become the web's largest library of print cartoons. Last year, Directors Ed Beardwell and Joel Mishon observed that their clients were licensing humorous cartoons in their thousands for blogs, powerpoint presentations, websites, e-books, social networking and the like, but had no access to short animations to use legally in the same way.

The flipside of the same problem was that animators were generating content in sizeable quantities but they had no way to monetize their valuable creations, other than uploading them to video-sharing sites and hoping to attract the attention of TV or film execs.

"Animations are a lot harder to aggregate than the still cartoons we previously specialised in, and that may be partly why nobody's done this before. They just take a lot longer to make, so at the moment our animations database is relatively small, but animators are now joining us constantly and as they upload material, the service becomes more and more useful to clients. Our task is also educating animators, who just don't realise that their short animations have value to our clients." said Joel Mishon.

Whilst it's still early days, in per-unit terms animations are already out-selling CartoonStock's traditional cartoon offerings and new uses for rich-media content are proliferating by the day. With deals already including content for educational website Kuder.com in the US and a TV commercial for Pomsy snack foods in India as well as numerous smaller scale uses, CartoonStock are comfortable that CSL Animations will form a major part of their future strategy.

CSL CartoonStock (www.CartoonStock.com), based in the city of Bath in the West of England, was founded in early 1998 as a stock-house through which top humorous cartoonists could sell their work. They now represent over 500 artists and have a rapidly expanding collection of cartoon images, animations, cartoonists and related services.